So I guess Buddhism is in? So are Shintoism and other ancestors worship based religions (I think? I don’t know how interventionist they tend to be). Platonism too (IIRC his higher being was also non interventionist)
Actually by that definition the actual effect on the “success” of wider society would not actually be particularly huge IMO. I mean I don’t see a massive difference between societies (contemporary and historical) that are based around those kind of religions to those that are based on deism of some kind. We wouldn’t have had the Catholic Church or the Abbasid Caliphate but we’d have had the non-deist equivalent do basically the same things.
I disagree; religion isn’t a tool, its followers are. Religion is the mental equivalent of a virus that takes advantage of flaws in human psychology to subvert people and turn then into vehicles for spreading itself, to their detriment. People don’t use religion, religion uses them. Even the cynical demagogues who don’t believe it but try to use it for their own purposes are still its tools, doing its work by spreading and reinforcing it. Whether they want to believe it or not.
I agree there is a distinction between philosophy and religion. And I tend to agree with what others have suggested as a standard; religion is when you introduce supernatural elements as an authority.
But the same person can put forth both philosophical and religious ideas. When Plato was discussing the dangers of mob rule leading to the rise of a tyrant he was presenting a philosophical idea. When he talked about how people will be judged by the gods when they die to determine which afterlife they will be sent to he was presenting a religious idea.
A person can talk about cars, and the same person can talk about cats, but it is entirely possible to discuss what they think about cars without bringing up what they think about cats. No conflation, easy peasy.
I’d say this is anachronistic modern thinking. In our modern secular society it’s very easy to make this distinction, I don’t think the distinction would have been as obvious to the ancient Greek philosophers themselves. I mean Pythagoras thought his maths theories were part of a holy mystical understanding of the universe!
I’m not sure where you’re going with this. It’s true a classical Greek might not recognize a difference between what we call philosophy and religion (or between what we call philosophy and science). But we’re not ancient Greeks. We can recognize the concept of religion as distinct from philosophy or science. And therefore we can have a meaningful discussion about whether society would have been as successful without religion.
Because the point is that every facet of ancient life was intertwined with religion. So when you ask if society would have been successful without religion, you think that you can just pluck out religion from the rest of society, which makes sense in your modern secular context; but in fact you’re also removing most forms of government practiced in the ancient world, most legal codes, etc.
Maybe you can post that without religion they’d have come up with secular alternatives for all of these things. But frankly, I doubt it. I find it more likely that without religion, we would never have gone all in on division of labor, and today we’d either still be hunter gatherers loosely distributed in small groups across the planet, or we’d be extinct.
Here’s a question. Religion, in its most primitive form, is clearly older than society, hell, older than Homo sapiens. What makes you so sure that without it we would even have evolved?
Right, I understand that. My point is that if you’re saying ‘it would be like this, but with these specific parts removed’, you are betraying a deep misunderstanding of how things worked in the ancient world, because religion is a major pillar impacting every other aspect of life and so it is incredibly unlikely that in the absence of religion those other things would have developed similarly.
Yeah, precisely - there are other ways to organize society, like a recognition of the inherent value of human life; but I don’t see how a tribe of hunter gatherers without even basic spiritualist beliefs is gonna make that leap of philosophical development, given how no culture on Earth did anything like that.
I’m not sure. What we’re discussing is a possibility, not a certainty. The one certain thing we’ve got is that that’s not what happened; so discussing what things might be like if something else had happened is bound to be discussing uncertainties.
I agree that in ancient societies it’s really unlikely that all these things were separable (though as once we get earlier than writing it’s very hard to tell what anybody was actually thinking, even as we learn more about what they were doing.)
But it seems to me that there would, without religion, still be plenty of incentives for a social being with language to come up with codes and methods for sorting out who’s allowed to take the fruit of which tree, which species can be hunted when and by whom, who if anybody and under what circumstances it’s OK to beat up or kill, who if anybody is entitled to tell which other people what work to do, who’s entitled to use the tool or shelter or whatever that X made and when and whether they have to give it back, and if we’re talking about humans who is allowed to have sex with whom and when and where they’re allowed to do so; as well as what to do when somebody inevitably doesn’t follow the rules.
I don’t see that the apparent fact that known human societies used religion to help work all of this out means that a species which hadn’t evolved a tendency to do so couldn’t work out such rules anyway.
I agree with that part. That’s why I’m saying that without religion chances are there wouldn’t have been a Roman Empire, and if there had been something equivalent it might not have collapsed in a similar fashion.
But whether there could have been some civilization that grew to a size similar to the Roman Empire, with technology of a sort that allowed a society of that size to hold together for some extended period of time, seems to me to be an open question.
Obviously somebody other than priests would have to be keeping records and facilitating communications across both years and miles.
At a fast glance, it looks as if “ancient” in the way they’re using it means “the approximate time of early Greek and Roman civilizations.” I think we’d have to be talking about senses of “ancient” that are a whole lot earlier than that.
And again we know next to nothing of what Neanderthals or early CroMagnon or possibly people earlier than that were thinking; or even what the preliterate populations that preceded the Greeks and Romans were thinking; or for that matter the population which built the city now called Çatalhöyük.
Religion is certainly not older than humanity or human society; it is a parasite that arose to take advantage of them. Religion can’t even exist without a language to spread it.
And I disagree with your position; religion is a destructive, corrupting force and a species unburdened by religion would have almost inevitably prospered and advanced much faster and better than humanity.
I ask you again: are there any evidence based scholars of ancient history who agree with your assessment?
That’s the region and time period he focuses on because it is his area of particular expertise (and also because it’s a time period we actually have surviving works from), but he touches on plenty of other cultures as well.